Christopher Krentz

Christopher Krentz is a professor of English and American Sign Language (ASL) at the University of Virginia. He grew up in St. Louis and Chicago, attended college at Yale in Connecticut, and worked for four wonderful years at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., which primarily serves deaf and hard of hearing students and where he learned ASL as a young man. He is the author of Elusive Kinship: Disability and Human Rights in Postcolonial Literature (Temple University Press 2022) as well as of Writing Deafness: The Hearing Line in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (University of North Carolina Press 2007). Moreover, he edited A Mighty Change: An Anthology of Deaf American Writing 1816-1864 (Gallaudet University Press 2000). In addition, in 2021 he co-edited a special issue of the Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies on representations of deafness (which is available via Project Muse). He co-founded and directed both the American Sign Language Program and the Disability Studies Initiative at U.Va. and is a happy husband and father.